The fact that Wageningen University & Research wants to make an impact on society with science is beyond dispute, says President of the Executive Board Louise Fresco. But ground-breaking discoveries do not always emanate from well-defined research plans, so she would like to see more scope for serendipity and failure. Art is a source of inspiration for this, she says ahead of the opening of the academic year on 6 September with its theme of Crossing Boundaries.
"It's about seeing things that are not immediately obvious and that you are not actually looking for. A discovery you make by chance, in other words. A well-known example is penicillin: when the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming used a Petri dish contaminated with a fungus in 1928, he realised that this method could be applied to fighting bacteria. It was pure chance, but of immense significance for medicine."
Is this kind of serendipity less likely to happen nowadays because of the focus on achieving results?
"There is limited scope for this, as we have to be accountable when we use large sums of public money, and rightly so. Moreover, we are extremely focused on impact. We want to find answers to the global challenges facing society: preserving biodiversity, dealing with climate change. Don't get me wrong - we are right to have that focus, but it does restrict the scope for serendipity and indeed for failure, too. Nowadays, failure mainly has a negative connotation, but it is part of life and part of scientific thinking. There is a reason why we use the expression 'masterful failures'. We need to have the courage to allow research to fail so that we can discover the unexpected beauty in it."
We need to have the courage to allow research to fail so that we can discover the unexpected beauty in it
Wageningen carries out a lot of applied research. Is there room in your agenda for free fundamental research?
"We do a lot of policy supporting research, and that's important for society. But we must continue to guard against becoming a supermarket in which other people can shop, looking for that one jar of peanut butter. That means that fundamental research must remain a permanent fixture and that we must be able to determine our own agenda within it. And we will make sure that happens. The great thing is that free fundamental research gives rise to serendipitous ideas for applied research. By the way, serendipity is also a vital component of applied research; a new perspective can shake up the established order, particularly in complicated issues such as nitrogen."
